Computer networks and other computer infrastructure provide the backbone for corporate and government institutions today. Computer assets represent significant investments of time and money for these institutions, in the procurement, operation, and maintenance of these assets. These assess require significant power resources to run and cool the machines. The assets also require continuous upgrading of software, including system patches and anti-virus programs. Maintenance demands require system personnel dedicated to keeping the assets up-to-date and operating.
Computer software developers require access to computer assets to test software under development. These development activities often require different computer configurations to ensure that the software is adequately tested. Often, to ensure that they have adequate platforms to test software, these developers maintain multiple workstations. Each workstation requires capital investment and significant maintenance costs and is often used a fraction of the time only.
This demand by software developers for different types of machines for short periods of time helped drive the development of virtualization. Virtualization allows for multiple platforms to reside on a single computer. That is, multiple virtual machines could reside on a single real machine. Although virtualization was supported on both individual work stations and servers, the emphasis of this development was on the work station, which was the more typical computer resource used by developers.
Even with tools that support virtualization on work stations, the work station approach still had deficiencies, particularly for large enterprises. First, a single work station was still a minimal environment. A work station would quickly run out of computing power and, as such, support a minimal number of virtual machines. A developer may still require multiple work stations to effectively test a software program. Also, large enterprises generally maintain strict controls over their computer networks. Individual end users generally did not have the proper permission to add machines on the network, even virtual machines. These restrictions were necessary to protect other computer assets on the network. Also, since the “hard drive” of a virtual machine is merely a file, these machines posed a security risk. An individual could walk off with a machine by copying the hard drive file from a work station to a portable storage unit, such as a memory stick or CD. So, even with the needed tools to create virtual machines on work stations, the end users could not use these machines.
One approach to overcome the problem of individuals within a large enterprise needing permission to connect virtual machines to the network and the ineffectiveness of work stations to run the tests would be to move the virtual machines into the data centers of the enterprises, that is, put the machines on the servers in the central data centers. A server could host many individual virtual machines. This approach was cost prohibitive at first, but the advent of inexpensive server-based virtualization software made the virtualization process cost-effective (ignoring the other costs associated with maintaining virtual machines). Although this approach would enable the system administrators to control access to the network, this approach would dramatically increase the work load of these administrators. They would need to create and destroy these machines. Creating the machines would require adding a suite of software to the machines, all of which require licenses. Once created, each machine would need to be maintained, including anti-virus updates and software patches—maintaining virtual machines in this respect is no different from maintaining real machines. Also, for enterprises where specific profit centers “own” the physical host in a data center, virtual machines could allow individuals from one profit center to use an asset paid for by another profit center.
Although software developers are one group of end users that can benefit from virtualization, enterprises as a whole may benefit as well. Through virtualization, these enterprises can maximize their computer assets and better manage their capital expenditures. For example, computer assets allocated to disaster recovery can host virtual machines during normal operations and then quickly be converted for disaster recovery use by destroying the virtual machines.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need to provide systems and methods that can allow end users to access virtual machines resident in a data center and provide administrators with entire control over the machines while minimizing the work required by the administrators to create and destroy the machine and minimizing the costs associated with the machine.